Hi Deborah,
Be very, very skeptical of anything you read in the TRON article. It is heavily biased against Unicode and anything perceived as American in origin, and makes some false and misleading statements about Unicode. For example, it states that Unicode has no room for expansion beyond the BMP, and that Unicode was designed without regard for Japanese needs and without input from Japanese experts.
There are other problems with the TRON article. It mixes together the concepts of punched-card codes and internal codes -- the two are related but different -- and completely ignores all internal codes between Baudot and ASCII. You will never find out about BCDIC, FIELDATA, or Stretch from the TRON article. And it engages in more gratuitous bashing of "the American computer industry" by exaggerating the difference between ISO 8859-1 and Windows-1252.
Unfortunately, I don't know of a web site that covers the entire history of character codes. Roman Czyborra's site is one of the best, as you have discovered. Jukka Korpela has a good page at http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html, but there is not much mention of anything pre-ASCII. You can always ask specific questions on this list; "legacy" character sets are far from off-topic here.
The best book on this subject is probably "Coded Character Sets, History and Development," by Charles E. Mackenzie (1980, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-14460-3). Because of the vintage of this book, it covers nothing in the personal-computer era, but that's OK; you can get lots of information on the personal-computer era elsewhere, while the "lost period" before ASCII is well-covered here. Unfortunately, Mackenzie's book is out of print and must be special-ordered, and isn't cheap (I paid Amazon USD 67 plus shipping for mine).
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
----- Original Message -----
From: Deborah W. Anderson
To: UNICODE@unicode.org
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 10:56 am
Subject: History of character codes
Does anyone have a recommendation on a website or book that adequately covers the history of character codes, other than the TRON site at http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html? Is there anything available that goes through the early period up through and including Unicode? (I like Roman Czyborra's pages at http://www.czyborra.com , but I was wondering whether there is a site/book that covers--in one swoop--the early period as well.)
With many thanks,
Deborah Anderson
Researcher, Dept. of Linguistics
UC Berkeley
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